Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Peter Duveen preserved a hard-copy archive of the New York Times and the New York Post from September 11th, 2001 and onward. He has located five articles from the Times, and three from the Post, which have somehow become so little known and linked to online, that a case for suppression could be made. The ability to purge the electronic archives of the "newspaper of record," as well as the best-selling tabloid, just a few years after a major news event, to the point of something being so little known as to become extinct, is shocking. It isn't any wonder why these articles were suppressed. Each contains information fundamentally at odds with the consensus official narrative. Much of the information printed in those first furious moments of chaos as contained in these 10 or so newspaper articles is most likely, the real truth.

After putting in their titles, all five pieces from the New York Times now pop up as first choice on Google, but how long that has been the case is difficult to determine. For me, one article in particular was a revelation, it was the first of many by the Times' avionics expert Matthew Wald, filed on September 13th, and it is filled with much fresh research harmful to the official story, but almost completely unknown as a cross reference or citation in 9/11 research. Easy to mislay a Wald piece isn't hard to imagine given the amount of work Wald turned out, and that would be with the connivance of the highest levels of management at the New York Times.

In any event---they are here now. I've organized this page to make a important point about the header method system the New York Times' used in posting these stories to electronic archives, perhaps as a way to defeat Google searches.

First, there sometimes comes a header file, AFTER THE ATTACKS: and into that sometimes, but not always, goes a second containing or organizing file, as here, MONITORING THE FLIGHTS; and lastly the title of the actual article dangles abbreviated. I have always had terrific luck finding pieces in search engines by putting in an exact title in quotation marks.

The Times' organizing system was part of the process to hide and obfuscate this important information. Although this system might have worked graphically in the paper editions, here online it is evidence of corruption, IMHO.

The controllers assigned to United Airlines Flight 175 on Tuesday suspected that it had been hijacked as it flew off its assigned route. But they did not learn that another plane had been hijacked and had hit the World Trade Center until a minute or two before Flight 175 struck the center, people involved in the air traffic system said.

In contrast, controllers at the Washington Air Route Traffic Control Center had much more warning that something was wrong. Those controllers, who handled American Airlines Flight 77, which dived into the Pentagon, knew about the hijacking of the first plane to crash, even before it hit the World Trade Center, those involved said. That was more than an hour before they watched another hijacked plane, United Flight 93, cross their radar screen on its way to the Pentagon.

Advance knowledge made no apparent difference in the response; nobody intercepted the plane.

''We issue control instructions,'' one controller said. ''Any procedures beyond that point don't lie with us.''

Those procedures would, in fact, lie with the Air Force. The question of giving the Air Force notice of hijackings and authorization to shoot down civilian planes is likely to be a major concern for security officials in the next few days. A spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration said today that there was a policy for when a civilian plane could be shot down, but the agency would not discuss it. The military routinely refuses to disclose its rules of engagement. Nor was it clear today exactly when, or if, the Pentagon was notified on Tuesday.

As the crisis took shape, information flowed unevenly within the F.A.A. The agency has broken up air traffic up into sectors small enough for two controllers to handle, and grouped the sectors in different air traffic offices. Such compartmentalization allows the agency to handle several thousand flights simultaneously, but may also have prevented information from flowing quickly enough.

The F.A.A. has refused to give details, saying that the way the information flows within the agency is part of the F.B.I.'s investigation into Tuesday's attacks. But people involved describe a haphazard flow.

For example, at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center in Ronkonkoma, which handles long-distance traffic around the New York metropolitan area, the first inkling of a hijacking that most controllers had was when a supervisor came to the cafeteria and asked if he could change the television channel to CNN.

''Our TV's are always tuned to ESPN,'' one controller said.

The television screen showed one tower of the World Trade Center with a hole in it. ''We didn't know what kind, what airplane. There were rumors it was a 737,'' the controller said. ''We said, 'No way, it would be a much bigger hole.' We were watching, and we saw the second one go in.''

In the darkened, windowless cavern that is the operations floor of the center, most controllers did not learn of the twin hijackings until their colleagues came up from the cafeteria.

At the control tower at La Guardia Airport, the first definitive information for controllers was the sight, viewed through binoculars, of the second plane plunging into the building. On the other hand, as soon as controllers in Boston heard that a plane might have hit the World Trade Center, they knew what had become of American Airlines Flight 11, which they had been tracking since it began behaving erratically, people involved said.

At the New York Terminal Radar Approach Control, the air traffic office whose airspace American Flight 11 entered soon before its crash, a conclusive report of what happened to that plane reached the room only a minute or two before the United plane hit the other tower, controllers there said. ''We had 90 to 120 seconds; it wasn't any 18 minutes,'' said one controller, referring to the actual elapsed time.

Another controller said: ''They dove into the airspace. By the time anybody saw anything, it was over.''

After the two World Trade Center crashes, controllers at the New York traffic center were briefed by their supervisors to watch for airplanes whose speed indicated that they were jets, but which either were not responding to commands or had disabled a surveillance device called a transponder. Controllers in Washington got a similar briefing, which helped them pick out hijacked planes more quickly. Two of the four planes had transponders that had apparently been tampered with in flight.

In fact, though, transponder failure is an ambiguous sign, even if the plane then strays from its assigned altitude and course. Controllers do not assume the worst ''if something weird happens with the airplane,'' said one; an electrical problem could be responsible and the pilot might be headed back to the departure airport. Standard procedure is to ''give him room and watch what he does,'' another controller said.

Transponders are robot radios, carried in a plane's tail, that respond to queries from ground-based radar by giving the plane's identity and altitude. Ground radar can calculate, based on the timing of the transponder response and the direction from which it came, the plane's latitude and longitude. American Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon, had had its transponder shut off, so controllers had less information on the flight. On United Flight 175, the second plane to hit the World Trade Center, someone changed the code that the transponder was sending, which had the effect of confusing the air traffic control computers. On the controller's screen, the data block, three lines of letters and numbers that give the plane's identity and other details, cut loose from the blip and drifted off.

Controllers also say they were told to watch for planes heading for Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. Unlike the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Camp David would be hard to spot from the air, but it is clearly marked on charts, because the airspace below 5,000 feet is off limits to civilian planes. But because Camp David is close to Washington and a hijacked plane's target is unknown, it would be hard to say whether a plane headed toward that location actually intended to go there, controllers noted.

September 20, 2001A NATION CHALLENGED: THE SKYSCRAPERS; Engineers Say Buildings Near Trade Center Held Up WellBy ERIC LIPTON AND JAMES GLANZ

Though buildings near the World Trade Center show evidence of damage like blown-out windows or gashes on their facades, none appear to be slumping, leaning or subsiding, and none are in danger of imminent collapse, engineers said yesterday after a detailed series of inspections.

Isolated structural repairs will be required on at least three large office buildings: Bankers Trust, 30 West Broadway and 3 World Financial Center. Many others, like 22 Cortlandt Street, will require more modest exterior repairs, as well as extensive work to windows, heating or ventilating systems, or other damaged parts.

But it is unlikely that any of these or other nearby buildings will need to be demolished, said Richard Tomasetti, president of LZA/Thornton-Tomasetti, the engineering firm the city hired for the assessments.

''All of them, in my opinion, there's no reason in the world that they can't be saved,'' Mr. Tomasetti said. ''I can't tell you what the owners will decide for the few buildings with limited structural problems, but these buildings don't need to come down.''

Two reporters from The New York Times obtained a copy of the city's preliminary assessment of 195 buildings in the area yesterday, and were allowed to view structures in and around what has come to be called ground zero. The contrasts there evoked the capricious power of an earthquake, with structurally sound buildings standing across the street from smoking mounds of rubble five or six stories high.

Through much of the area south of Park Place, north of Albany Street and west of Broadway, there are stretches where hundreds of windows facing the towers have been blown out. Roofs have been damaged from falling debris, including airplane parts found on the Federal Office Building at 90 Church Street and another building across Barclay Street, at 100 Church Street. Other building exteriors are singed by fire or just caked with soot.

But the preliminary results of the city's detailed building-by-building assessment of the area support the conclusion that while damage to facades and interiors is occasionally severe and plainly visible, many of the buildings could be occupied in several weeks to several months. There is no evidence that any buildings have been compromised structurally in a way that would require demolition.

In part, the survey suggests, that is because the twin towers collapsed almost straight downward, a circumstance that the engineers said might have reduced the death toll from the terrorist attack.

''It's like controlled demolition,'' said Matthys Levy, a founding partner at Weidlinger Associates, a structural engineering firm in New York. Mr. Levy, the co-author of ''Why Buildings Fall Down'' (Norton, 1992), said the collapse of the towers was ''an uncontrolled demolition project, but it acted like a controlled demolition project.''

If the buildings had tipped or tumbled sideways instead, Mr. Levy said, ''you would have seen tremendous damage outside the zone, and you would have had those buildings possibly collapse.''

The eight-page Department of Buildings survey of 195 structures in and around the World Trade Center complex again and again reports ''building is safe'' or ''minor cleanup required'' or ''O.K. to occupy.'' Buildings with those kinds of findings include 4 World Financial Center, occupied in large part by Merrill Lynch & Company. and 75 Park Place, the home to the city's Office of Management and Budget.

Even 1 Liberty Plaza, a building with more than 50 stories across the street from 4 World Trade Center, which is partially collapsed, is listed as ''structurally sound, including facade,'' despite rumors during the last week that it was nearing collapse. (The 4, 5 and 6 World Trade Center buildings are largely wrecked and will have to be demolished, an engineer said.)

The Millenium Hilton Hotel is also structurally sound, the survey says, though it is missing some front windows and its lower facade is damaged.

These assessments do not mean that tenants will necessarily be able to move back soon. The 75 Park Place building needs an extensive cleanup, as does 4 World Financial Center, where employees may not able to return for two to three months, a Merrill Lynch spokesman said.

Engineers also cautioned that after the main structural questions have been addressed, a wide range of other cleanup and repair work would remain, including repairing or replacing heating, cooling and ventilation systems; replacing hundreds of windows; restoring electricity and installing or repairing fire alarms and security systems.

''Merrill Lynch will not put one person back into any of our buildings until we are absolutely sure that they will be safe,'' said Rich Silverman, a Merrill Lynch spokesman.

John F. Hennessy III, the chairman of Syska and Hennessy, a engineering firm that specializes in mechanical and electrical systems, said the problems inside the buildings were likely to be similar to those encountered after the 1993 bombing of the trade center.

''One of the big problems there was getting the building clean because there was a tremendous amount of smoke that went through the building,'' said Mr. Hennessy, whose firm worked on the trade center after the bombing and has been hired to rebuild systems in the interior of the Pentagon.

The appearance of the residential buildings where thousands of people live south of Gateway Plaza in Battery Park City supports Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's assertions that they have suffered no major damage, although dozens of windows on the east facade of Gateway Plaza have been blown out.

On the northern edge of Battery Park City near the Embassy Suites Hotel and the movie theater, there is no apparent structural damage.

A handful of buildings have not been inspected thoroughly yet, including three on Cedar Street, in part because of their proximity to the center of the impact zone.

The effort to assess the damage to the 195 buildings in the area has involved about 100 engineers making the inspections, officials said. On average, about 2,000 workers, using everything from large cranes to metal cutters, are at the site each day, removing debris and preventing damaged facades from tumbling. For example, a beam from one of the World Trade Center towers pierced the facade of 3 World Financial Center, and workers have tied it down until it can be safely removed.

The building assessment and cleanup effort is led by Michael Burton, executive deputy commissioner, of the city's Department of Design and Construction, in cooperation with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and private sector consultants.

The command center of the project is on the second floor of Public School/Intermediate School 89, at the intersection of Chambers and West Streets. Boxes of hard hats and goggles sit in the entrance hallway.

Six major construction companies in the New York region have been recruited to help with the work: Tully Construction, Amec Construction Management, Bovis Lend Lease, Turner Construction, Plaza Construction and Tishman Construction. LZA/Thornton-Tomasetti Group is overseeing the individual building assessments. Mueser Rutledge, another engineering consulting company, is working to ensure that the massive underground walls that surround the World Trade Center complex and hold back the Hudson River are not compromised.

This work is under way as firefighters continue to douse smoldering debris. In a classroom at the school used by the engineers and city officials as a meeting room, bins of colored building blocks sat on shelves and children's books sat abandoned. A large spiral notebook propped up in one corner had been carefully lettered with this message:

As thousands of workers streamed back into Lower Manhattan yesterday for the first time since the terrorist attacks, federal officials said they faced no significant health risk.

Low levels of asbestos were detected in some dust and debris close to the wreckage of the World Trade Center, the officials said, but there was no evidence of danger, except to search crews moving the rubble.

''We haven't found anything that is alarming to us,'' said Mary Mears, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency.

As an extra precaution, officials recommended that businesses in the area clean the filters on air-conditioners and use vacuum cleaners equipped with filters for fine particles -- those labeled HEPA -- to avoid scattering any hazardous dust.

Officials recommended similar precautions for apartment dwellers, saying they should use vacuums with particle filters, mop floors and use wet cloths to dust, and wash clothing soiled by the ash and dust separately from other laundry.

Over all, though, officials said, the only significant health risk remained near the destruction. Workers there should wear masks and protective gear and clean their shoes before heading home, they said.

Some officials expressed frustration because many of the workers -- most of them hard-bitten construction workers -- were ignoring their recommendations.

''In the early hours of a rescue, the urgency of these efforts leads people to forget their own health and safety,'' said Dr. Neal L. Cohen, New York City's health commissioner. The city will add more safety officials to its teams this week, he said, to make sure that more searchers wear protective attire.

Tina Kreisher, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., said that ample gear was available at the attack site but that because of the heat and stress, workers commonly refused it.

''There are small pockets of asbestos,'' Ms. Kreisher said. ''The concern is there -- not for the city, not for residents, but definitely for these workers.'' Many workers may be there for months, she said.

Federal officials said they would set up at the site equipment able to clean 1,500 workers twice a day.

Agency officials and independent experts tried to quell rumors about other hazards, including the possibility that the fires might have turned freon from air-conditioners into a poisonous gas called phosgene.

The chemical reaction that generates phosgene is possible in extremely hot flames, but not in fires like those still burning, agency officials said. Any gas generated by the initial inferno has dissipated, they said.

When rescue crews prepare to enter buried pockets where survivors might be found, they generally test the air for organic compounds like freon, which can be suffocating because it is heavier than air and can build up in pockets, officials said. Suspect air samples are sent to a mobile laboratory for analysis.

Dr. Cohen said that continual monitoring of the crash site and rubble with Geiger counters had turned up no evidence of radiation, which might be emitted, for example, from medical X-ray equipment destroyed in the attacks.

Many officials and experts added that the decomposing bodies of victims of the attacks posed no danger.

''A dead body is not going to give you a disease,'' said Dr. Paul Blake, the state epidemiologist for Georgia. Dr. Blake, who was chief of the enteric diseases branch at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, added, ''You have a multiplication of bacteria in decomposing bodies, but they are the same bacteria we all have within us, in our bodies and on our skin.''

To try to catch any surprises, the Environmental Protection Agency deployed monitoring and testing equipment around Lower Manhattan over the weekend, including a mobile laboratory used during the Persian Gulf war to check for gas or biological attacks, officials said.

There were no signs that the attackers had dispersed any toxic agents, officials said, and the laboratory was focused on identifying conventional kinds of pollution.

Many dust samples collected near the attack site last week contained 1 percent to 2 percent asbestos, agency officials said. That concentration is not high enough to create a short-term risk of lung disease, the officials said. Nonetheless, the agency sent 10 trucks into the area over the weekend equipped with filtered vacuums that suck up contaminants without spreading them.

For residents and people working nearby, the air appeared to present little risk, officials of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration said. The agency sent crews around the financial district late last week wearing small devices that sample air and found no significant signs of asbestos. Other tests were done for air inside buildings in the financial district.

''Our tests show that it is safe for New Yorkers to go back to work,'' said a statement from John L. Henshaw, the assistant secretary of Labor for occupational health. ''Keeping the streets clean and being careful not to track dust into buildings will help protect workers from remaining debris.''

Over the weekend the Environmental Protection Agency parked five air sampling systems near the crash site and put another one on Canal Street to monitor any drift uptown. The systems will measure asbestos, lead, PCB's and other harmful compounds during the cleanup, agency officials said. Other samples were being taken at established pollution monitoring stations in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, the chairman of the department of community and preventive medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, generally agreed with the federal officials' views, adding that rescue workers who did not wear protective gear ran the highest risk.

Dr. Landrigan, who has often worked to highlight health dangers in the environment, said the public faced little risk. ''People who live in Lower Manhattan and who work there are certainly going to be exposed to dust,'' he said. The dust, from pulverized building materials, could cause bronchitis or asthma attacks in children or vulnerable adults, he said.

''But having said all that,'' he added, ''I don't think we are looking at a situation that is in any way life-threatening.''

Some office workers were taking no chances. One woman rode the commuter train from Westchester County yesterday morning carrying a personal air-filtering machine for her office in the city.

September 13, 2001AFTER THE ATTACKS: AFTERSHOCKS; As Remnants Collapse, Workers Run For CoverBy JENNIFER STEINHAUER

The stalagmite remnants of the fallen World Trade Center towers collapsed entirely yesterday, sending rumbling debris and clouds of smoke billowing again through Lower Manhattan and prompting rescue workers to flee from the site of the destruction. Officials declared a zone of roughly eight more blocks in the area unstable.

City officials confirmed last night that the steel and concrete wreckage of the south tower, which had been toppled in a terrorist attack, and 5 World Trade Center, felled in the aftermath, crumpled to the ground in the late afternoon.

Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen said last night at a news conference that engineers were busy inspecting neighboring buildings in response to reports of a crack in 1 Liberty Plaza, the 64-story high rise. That plaza has sustained structural damage, but officials said last night that although they had not determined the extent of the damage to that building or others on Liberty Street, they did not believe that it was in imminent danger of collapse.

All day yesterday, rescue and emergency workers battled through the destruction, confronting ruptured gas lines, raining debris and constant rumors of other buildings said to be weakened from the attacks.

''This is a very dangerous rescue effort,'' Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said last night. ''The men and women who are doing it are literally putting their lives at risk.''

The fragile search and recovery efforts were hampered intermittently for several hours, and precautionary evacuations led to moments of panic among rescue workers. Police and emergency workers in the areas around the destruction barked into their radios, arguing with pedestrians trying to cross barriers and telling them that more and more buildings were unstable.

Officials also said yesterday that it did not appear that the residential buildings in Battery Park City had sustained structural damage, but the city was still assessing those buildings to decide whether to allow those who have been evacuated to return.

The seeming aftershocks began about about 5 p.m. yesterday, while workers ploddingly cut through twisted steel and heavy forklifts moved rubble across the plaza in front of the fallen towers. Firefighters and police officers were standing around, gazing toward the clouds of gray smoke wafting up from the jagged heaps of wreckage. Nearby, workers had set up a triage center near the World Financial Center.

First came a rumble, and then one firefighter yelled: ''That part will go! We are waiting for it to collapse.'' Moments later, the remaining floors of the south tower of the World Trade Center fell to the ground in a heap of rubble.

Rescue workers and medical personnel bolted up Broadway and Church Street away from flying debris, concrete and smoke as ambulances began to scream from all directions, responding to the new collapse.

''Everyone started running,'' said Jonothan Schwartz, a Red Cross worker from Rockland County who stopped at last at Canal and Broadway. ''We were told there was more danger of another building falling. Everyone ran and ran -- kept going and didn't look back.

About the same time, the city's engineers yesterday expanded a safety zone around buildings that they believe had a greater chance of collapsing than earlier believed. Emergency personnel were temporarily evacuated from several blocks surrounding 1 Liberty Plaza at the southwestern edge of the World Trade Center.

Frantic calls to the police and Fire Department workers came from all directions, with reports of swaying buildings at John Street and the intersection of Greenwich and Liberty Streets.

Over at the West Side Highway, hundreds of people, frightened of falling debris, raced south, away from what they believed to be a collapsing building. They pushed past police barricades and dodged rescue equipment that was hastily being thrown into reverse. Many searched for a car to dive behind.

Firefighters and police officers led the stampede, struggling to race along streets thick with dust, empty water bottles, bits of metal and wire. Firefighters in heavy bunker gear yelled at colleagues, who stood looking toward a rolling pillar of smoke to move. ''Get out of here!'' screamed one investigator. ''Run! Run!''

It then became a question of time. Would the fuel burn up first or would the steel columns weaken and buckle under the heat?

For the people on floors above the crash site, there was another critical factor: an ordinary fire would take two or three hours to burn through the gypsum wallboard around the stairwells -- but projectiles of plane wreckage almost certainly pierced through, letting in the fire and smoke. That trapped people on the upper floors.

The south tower collapsed 56 minutes after impact. The north tower lasted an hour and 40 minutes.

Someone probably could build a fortress skyscraper. ''Given enough money, we can design anything,'' said Dr. Charles H. Thornton, chairman of the Thornton-Tomasetti Group Inc. of New York City, the structural engineering firm that worked on the 1,483-foot-tall Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

But no one would pay to build one, and no one would want to work there. Such a building would probably have the aesthetic appeal of a containment vessel of a nuclear power plant, which is designed to survive the crash of a falling 747.

In the decades since the World Trade Center was built, however, new materials and building techniques -- some used on the more recent super skyscrapers like the Petronas Towers -- may have given people more time to escape.

The key would have been slowing the fires. The sprinkler systems offered little help.

Even if the pipes survived the impact, the sprinklers of a typical skyscraper put out a few hundred gallons of water a minute for half an hour, Dr. Thornton said, and water would have been useless against a fuel fire in any case. (Water and oil don't mix; droplets of water sink into the fuel, turn into hot steam and explode, and the fuel continues burning.)

By contrast, an anti-fire system at an aircraft hangar can unleash a deluge of 120,000 gallons a minute of water and foam -- which sticks to burning fuel -- for two hours straight, Dr. Thornton said.

Since extinguishing the fire is impossible, ''You have to build a more rugged building,'' said Dr. R. Brady Williamson, an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.

The main ingredients of any skyscraper are steel and concrete. Both are strong, but in different ways. Concrete bears more weight; steel can bend without breaking. The World Trade Center's supporting columns were made of steel, and the intense heat would have caused the girders to expand, distorting their shape and sapping their strength, leading to the collapse.

''It's better to build in reinforced concrete,'' said Dr. Mir M. Ali, a professor of architecture at the University of Illinois. ''If there is an impact, crash or explosion, it can absorb the energy better. That makes the building less vulnerable.''

But reinforced concrete -- concrete with steel bars inside -- is heavier. When construction began on the World Trade Center in the late 1960's, concrete was not a viable option because it would have required huge, unwieldy pillars to support the towers' weight. But high-strength concrete developed in recent years has made it more practical.

Each of the two Petronas Towers has an outer ring of 16 7-foot-wide columns made of concrete and at the center of each tower is a 75-foot by 75-foot concrete core -- almost a building within a building -- that houses the stairwells and elevator shafts.

Concrete -- a mix of cement, sand and gravel -- is not impervious to heat. The cement expands at a different rate than the sand and gravel, causing cracks. Under intense heat, some types of concrete can flake apart at about three-quarters of an inch an hour, eventually exposing the steel inside.

''It ultimately would lose its strength,'' Dr. Thornton said.

The concrete core of the Petronas Towers may have remained intact under a similar crash and provided a better escape route than the gypsum-walled stairwells of the World Trade Center.

''In our buildings, most of the stairways are in the core, which is a very safe haven,'' Dr. Thornton said. The cores of the Petronas Towers are also pressurized to keep smoke and fire out of the stairwells.

In addition to building more fire-resistant structures, another protection against crashing airplanes would be to keep the jet fuel from entering the interior of the building.

At the University of California at Berkeley, Dr. Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a professor of structural engineering, has been developing a new construction technique -- bolting half-inch steel plates to six-inch concrete walls -- to create buildings that can better survive earthquakes. ''The concrete wall prevents the steel from buckling,'' Dr. Astaneh-Asl said. ''The steel prevents the concrete from cracking and shattering. When you marry them, they become very good.''

In tests, a half-scale, three-story building proved capable of surviving four magnitude-9 earthquakes. While the wreckage of the 767's flew into the interior of the World Trade Center, the extra mass of concrete and steel walls would have absorbed much of the planes' momentum.

''Most of the fracturing of the plane will take place outside of the building, not inside,'' Dr. Astaneh-Asl said. That is the same fundamental physics that make the S.U.V. the lesser damaged in a collision with a motorcycle.

Much of the fuel would have then splashed against the outside of the building instead of igniting inside, Dr. Astaneh-Asl said.

The World Trade Center attack may lead developers to regard a terrorist attack as a risk to be planned for instead of an unthinkable one-time tragedy.

''The perception of the terrorist threat is where earthquake hazards were in the mid- to late 1960's,'' said Dr. Jeremy Isenberg, president and chief at Weidlinger Associates, a consulting firm that once helped design resilient military bases and missile silos, and now offers its expertise for federal and commercial buildings. ''It took a series of three or four damaging earthquakes to drive home to owners of buildings that they had financial assets at risk.''

Developers may now request that more resilience be built into new buildings and into old ones being remodeled, Dr. Isenberg said.

While perhaps not much can protect against kamikaze jetliners, other simple steps may help protect against lesser attacks. Large, heavy cement flower pots, like those placed around the World Trade Center after the 1993 bombing, keep a car bomb a safe distance from the structural columns. Concrete walls around loading docks and mail rooms can be thickened to protect against bomb blasts. Jackets of graphite fibers wrapped around columns make them less likely to collapse. Protective glaze can be added to windows to make them less likely to shatter.

In planning for new buildings, structural designers are now more likely to add more redundancy where the collapse of one column does not lead to the collapse of the entire building, as occurred in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Dr. Thornton said that in one sense, taller buildings are safer than midrise buildings; taller buildings are less likely to topple because their builders generally provided more redundancy into the structures. The design of skyscrapers 50 stories or more, has been ''generally very robust,'' said Dr. Thornton. ''For 40 or less, it's not.''

1. We-the President of the United States, the President of the National Government of the Republic of China, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, representing the hundreds of millions of our countrymen, have conferred and agree that Japan shall be given an opportunity to end this war. 2. The prodigious land, sea and air forces of the United States, the British Empire and of China, many times reinforced by their armies and air fleets from the west, are poised to strike the final blows upon Japan. This military power is sustained and inspired by the determination of all the Allied Nations to prosecute the war against Japan until she ceases to resist. 3. The result of the futile and senseless German resistance to the might of the aroused free peoples of the world stands forth in awful clarity as an example to the people of Japan. The might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which, when applied to the resisting Nazis, necessarily laid waste to the lands, the industry and the method of life of the whole German people. The full application of our military power, backed by our resolve, will mean the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland. 4. The time has come for Japan to decide whether she will continue to be controlled by those self-willed militaristic advisers whose unintelligent calculations have brought the Empire of Japan to the threshold of annihilation, or whether she will follow the path of reason. 5. Following are our terms. We will not deviate from them. There are no alternatives. We shall brook no delay. 6. There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest, for we insist that a new order of peace, security and justice will be impossible until irresponsible militarism is driven from the world. 7. Until such a new order is established and until there is convincing proof that Japan's war-making power is destroyed, points in Japanese territory to be designated by the Allies shall be occupied to secure the achievement of the basic objectives we are here setting forth. 8. The terms of the Cairo Declaration shall be carried out and Japanese sovereignty shall be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine. 9. The Japanese military forces, after being completely disarmed, shall be permitted to return to their homes with the opportunity to lead peaceful and productive lives. 10. We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation, but stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners. The Japanese Government shall remove all obstacles to the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies among the Japanese people. Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights shall be established. 11. Japan shall be permitted to maintain such industries as will sustain her economy and permit the exaction of just reparations in kind, but not those which would enable her to re-arm for war. To this end, access to, as distinguished from control of, raw materials shall be permitted. Eventual Japanese participation in world trade relations shall be permitted. 12. The occupying forces of the Allies shall be withdrawn from Japan as soon as these objectives have been accomplished and there has been established in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people a peacefully inclined and responsible government. 13. We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.

The President of the United States and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom, have met at sea.

They have been accompanied by officials of their two Governments, including high-ranking officers of their Military, Naval, and Air Services.

The whole problem of the supply of munitions of war, as provided by the Lease-Lend Act, for the armed forces of the United States and for those countries actively engaged in resisting aggression has been further examined.

Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister of Supply of the British Government, has joined in these conferences. He is going to proceed to Washington to discuss further details with appropriate officials of the United States Government. These conferences will also cover the supply problems of the Soviet Union.

The President and the Prime Minister have had several conferences. They have considered the dangers to world civilization arising from the policies of military domination by conquest upon which the Hitlerite government of Germany and other governments associated therewith have embarked, and have made clear the stress which their countries are respectively taking for their safety in the face of these dangers.

They have agreed upon the following joint declaration:

Joint declaration of the President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.

First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other;

Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned;

Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them;

Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity;

Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement, and social security;

Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want;

Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance;

Eighth, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea, or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measures which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.

The photo -- three firefighters hoisting a flag atop the World Trade Center ruins -- became an instant symbol of America's resolve in the face of calamity.

Now that very flag is flying high above the deck of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, deployed from Norfolk, Va., as the United States readies for war.

"The flag represents the spirit and courage of all Americans," Adm. Robert J. Natter, commander of the Atlantic Fleet, said in a news release. "It has incredible meaning for all our sailors and Marines, and we're proud to fly it aboard our most powerful warships. It will serve as both a remembrance and as a motivator for our . . . naval forces."

The Theodore Roosevelt is leading all U.S. warships in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. The fleet's location has not been disclosed.

When the carrier returns, its officers will present the flag to the New York City Fire Department, Natter said.

The flag and the men who raised it were captured by Thomas E. Franklin, a photographer for The Record, hours after the Twin Towers collapsed.

Franklin was near the trade center's ruined Building Seven when he spotted Firefighters Dan McWilliams, George Johnson, and Billy Eisengrein raising the flag on a pole plucked from a yacht. The men had anchored the flagpole in rubble about 20 feet above West Street.

The photograph ran in The Record and hundreds of other newspapers and appeared on network television. It immediately drew comparisons to the photo of Marines raising the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima during World War II.

On Sept. 23, New York Gov. George Pataki and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani signed the flag on its white binding and presented it to Natter. An added inscription in part reads, "FDNY -- Division I -- World Trade Center, September 11, 2001, New York City, USA."

The carrier left U.S. waters four days before the flag was handed over. It arrived Sunday via military aircraft.

"This is a proud moment for the TR and a proud moment for all of America," said the ship's commander, Rear Adm. Mark P. Fitzgerald.

The flag was presented to the ship's fire crew. It will make the rounds to fly aboard each ship in the battle group.

Capt. Rich O'Hanlan, a native New Yorker and the ship's commanding officer, said the flag "represents not only America, but also our courage and determination to overcome all challenges put before us."

He added: "This flag will truly be an inspiration to me and my crew."

On the day the photo was taken, the firefighters who raised the flag were not aware they were making history.

Interviewed later, McWilliams said he and other rescuers were frustrated after digging for six hours and finding no survivors.

"Everybody just needed a shot in the arm," he said. That was the inspiration for grabbing the flagpole.

Johnson recalled the shouts from other firefighters who were watching.

"A few guys yelled out, 'Good job!' and 'Way to go!' " Johnson said.

Staff Writer Elise Young's e-mail address is younge@northjersey.com

In all cases, but here especially, the word "incredible," should be understood to mean, on both the higher soul levels as well as the baser intellectual, as "not believable."

The NJ News, bergen.com, The Record, and the Bergen Record, all doubtlessly share the same corporate parentage. This would make Elise Young the privileged colleague of Thomas E. Franklin, and the increase in her credibility and access should be taken into consideration.

I give her very high marks for coming up with the term, "plucked"---a word more often used with feathers and grapes then for riparian ripoffs. McWilliams use of "grabbing" gets an honorable mention, but it lost points by not having been used in a direct quotation.

The mention of the flag's presentation to the ship's "fire crew," is a fine acknowledgment of the holistic interconnectedness of all the players.

"Franklin was near the trade center's ruined Building Seven" is just a big boo boo.

"McWilliams said he and other rescuers were frustrated after digging for six hours and finding no survivors." Hmmm. When the firefighter testimonies were published in the New York Times, it was established that nobody did any digging at all that day---at least until well after 5:30pm EDT---or perhaps twenty minutes earlier for the BBC in GMT.

"The men had anchored the flagpole in rubble about 20 feet above West Street." Well now. I'm wondering if Ms. Young has ever tried to secure a live Christmas tree vertically in a three-pronged stand of Chinese manufacture?

"On the day the photo was taken the firefighters...were not aware they were making history." But I bet the three photographers who captured the moment did. Too bad none of the three captured a single image of the south face of Building 7 in flames, or images of the conflagration in 90 West Street, the lavish and historic Cass Gilbert skyscraper, whose three-story copper Mansard roof was completely burned through that day.

More Lost Sea Scroll work to do over on 911Flogger. Have the flood gates opened or something?

Saturday, December 27, 2008

In order to force immediate surrender and save American lives by delivering a knockout blow to an already staggering Japan, or, as Gar Alperovitz alternatively argues, to brandish U.S. might against and constrain the Soviet Union in Europe and Asia, or, as Tsuyoshi Hasegawa contends, to exact revenge against Japan while limiting Soviet gains in Asia, Truman willingly risked the unthinkable. He did so without even attempting other means to procure Japanese surrender, such as clarifying the surrender terms to insure the safety and continued “rule” of Emperor Hirohito as Stimson and almost all of Truman’s other close advisors urged him to do, but which he and Byrnes resisted until after the two atomic bombs had been dropped; allowing Stalin to sign the Potsdam Proclamation, which would have signaled imminent Soviet entry into the war; or announcing and, if necessary, demonstrating the existence of the bomb. What terrified many scientists from an early stage in the process was the realization that the bombs that were used to wipe out Hiroshima and Nagasaki were but the most rudimentary and primitive prototypes of the incalculably more powerful weapons on the horizon--mere first steps in a process of maximizing destructive potential.

The US resumed bombing of Japan after a two-year lull following the 1942 Doolittle raids in fall 1944. The goal of the bombing assault that destroyed Japan's major cities in the period between May and August 1945, the US Strategic Bombing Survey explained, was "either to bring overwhelming pressure on her to surrender, or to reduce her capability of resisting invasion. . . . [by destroying] the basic economic and social fabric of the country." [23] A proposal by the Chief of Staff of the Twentieth Air Force to target the imperial palace was rejected, but in the wake of successive failures to eliminate such key strategic targets as Japan's Nakajima Aircraft Factory west of Tokyo, the area bombing of Japanese cities was approved. [24]

The full fury of firebombing and napalm was unleashed on the night of March 9-10, 1945 when LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyo from the Marianas. Their mission was to reduce the city to rubble, kill its citizens, and instill terror in the survivors, with jellied gasoline and napalm that would create a sea of flames. Stripped of their guns to make more room for bombs, and flying at altitudes averaging 7,000 feet to evade detection, the bombers, which had been designed for high-altitude precision attacks, carried two kinds of incendiaries: M47s, 100-pound oil gel bombs, 182 per aircraft, each capable of starting a major fire, followed by M69s, 6-pound gelled-gasoline bombs, 1,520 per aircraft in addition to a few high explosives to deter firefighters. [25]

The attack on an area that the US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated to be 84.7 percent residential succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of air force planners. Whipped by fierce winds, flames detonated by the bombs leaped across a fifteen square mile area of Tokyo generating immense firestorms that engulfed and killed scores of thousands of residents.

Akakaze, the red wind that swept with hurricane force across the Tokyo plain and propelled firestorms across the city with terrifying speed and intensity. The wind drove temperatures up to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, creating superheated vapors that advanced ahead of the flames, killing or incapacitating their victims. "The mechanisms of death were so multiple and simultaneous -- oxygen deficiency and carbon monoxide poisoning, radiant heat and direct flames, debris and the trampling feet of stampeding crowds -- that causes of death were later hard to ascertain . . ." [27]

The Strategic Bombing Survey, whose formation a few months earlier provided an important signal of Roosevelt's support for strategic bombing, provided a technical description of the firestorm and its effects on Tokyo:"The chief characteristic of the conflagration . . . was the presence of a fire front, an extended wall of fire moving to leeward, preceded by a mass of pre-heated, turbid, burning vapors . . . . The 28-mile-per-hour wind, measured a mile from the fire, increased to an estimated 55 miles at the perimeter, and probably more within. An extended fire swept over 15 square miles in 6 hours . . . . The area of the fire was nearly 100 percent burned; no structure or its contents escaped damage. "The survey concluded -- plausibly, but only for events prior to August 6, 1945 -- that "probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man. People died from extreme heat, from oxygen deficiency, from carbon monoxide asphyxiation, from being trampled beneath the feet of stampeding crowds, and from drowning. The largest number of victims were the most vulnerable: women, children and the elderly."

How many people died on the night of March 9-10 in what flight commander Gen. Thomas Power termed "the greatest single disaster incurred by any enemy in military history?" The Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that 87,793 people died in the raid, 40,918 were injured, and 1,008,005 people lost their homes. Robert Rhodes, estimating the dead at more than 100,000 men, women and children, suggested that probably a million more were injured and another million were left homeless. The Tokyo Fire Department estimated 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded. The Tokyo Police offered a figure of 124,711 killed and wounded and 286,358 building and homes destroyed. The figure of roughly 100,000 deaths, provided by Japanese and American authorities, both of whom may have had reasons of their own for minimizing the death toll, seems to me arguably low in light of population density, wind conditions, and survivors' accounts. [28] With an average of 103,000 inhabitants per square mile and peak levels as high as 135,000 per square mile, the highest density of any industrial city in the world, and with firefighting measures ludicrously inadequate to the task, 15.8 square miles of Tokyo were destroyed on a night when fierce winds whipped the flames and walls of fire blocked tens of thousands fleeing for their lives. An estimated 1.5 million people lived in the burned out areas. Given a near total inability to fight fires of the magnitude produced by the bombs, it is possible to imagine that casualties may have been several times higher than the figures presented on both sides of the conflict. The single effective Japanese government measure taken to reduce the slaughter of US bombing was the 1944 evacuation to the countryside of 400,000 children from major cities, 225, 000 of them from Tokyo. [29]

Following the attack, LeMay, never one to mince words, said that he wanted Tokyo "burned down -- wiped right off the map" to "shorten the war." Tokyo did burn. Subsequent raids brought the devastated area of Tokyo to more than 56 square miles, provoking the flight of millions of refugees.

No previous or subsequent conventional bombing raid ever came close to generating the toll in death and destruction of the great Tokyo raid of March 9-10. The airborne assault on Tokyo and other Japanese cities ground on relentlessly. According to Japanese police statistics, the 65 raids on Tokyo between December 6, 1944 and August 13, 1945 resulted in 137,582 casualties, 787,145 homes and buildings destroyed, and 2,625,279 people displaced. [30] Following the Tokyo raid of March 9-10, the firebombing was extended nationwide. In the ten-day period beginning on March 9, 9,373 tons of bombs destroyed 31 square miles of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe. Overall, bombing strikes destroyed 40 percent of the 66 Japanese cities targeted, with total tonnage dropped on Japan increasing from 13,800 tons in March to 42,700 tons in July. [31] If the bombing of Dresden produced a ripple of public debate in Europe, no discernible wave of revulsion, not to speak of protest, took place in the US or Europe in the wake of the far greater destruction of Japanese cities and the slaughter of civilian populations on a scale that had no parallel in the history of bombing.

In July, US planes blanketed the few remaining Japanese cities that had been spared firebombing with an "Appeal to the People." "As you know," it read, "America which stands for humanity, does not wish to injure the innocent people, so you had better evacuate these cities." Half the leafleted cities were firebombed within days of the warning. US planes ruled the skies. Overall, by one calculation, the US firebombing campaign destroyed 180 square miles of 67 cities, killed more than 300,000 people and injured an additional 400,000, figures that exclude the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [32] Between January and July 1945, the US firebombed and destroyed all but five Japanese cities, deliberately sparing Kyoto, the ancient imperial capital, and four others. The extent of the destruction was impressive ranging from 50 to 60% of the urban area destroyed in cities including Kobe, Yokohama and Tokyo, to 60 to 88% in seventeen cities, to 98.6% in the case of Toyama. [33] In the end, the Atomic Bomb Selection Committee chose Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki as the pristine targets to display the awesome power of the atomic bomb to Japan and the world in the event that would both bring to a spectacular end the costliest war in human history and send a powerful message to the Soviet Union.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1945 the US air war in Japan reached an intensity that is still perhaps unrivaled in the magnitude of human slaughter. [35] That moment was a product of the combination of technological breakthroughs, American nationalism, and the erosion of moral and political scruples pertaining to the killing of civilians, perhaps intensified by the racism that crystallized in the Pacific theatre. [36]

In contrast to these responses to the war in Germany and Japan, and even to the ongoing debate in the US about the uses of the atomic bomb, there has been virtually no awareness of, not to speak of critical reflection on, the US bombing of Japanese civilians in the months prior to Hiroshima. The systematic bombing of Japanese noncombatants in the course of the destruction of Japanese cities must be added to a list of the horrific legacies of the war that includes Nazi genocide and a host of Japanese war crimes against Asian peoples. Only by engaging the issues, and above all the impact of this approach to the massive killing of noncombatants that has been central to all subsequent US wars, can Americans begin to approach the Nuremberg ideal that holds victors as well as vanquished to the same standards with respect to crimes against humanity, or the standard of the 1949 Geneva Accord which requires the protection of civilians in time of war. This is the principle of universality enshrined at Nuremberg and violated in practice by the US and others beginning with the 1946 trials, which declared US immunity from prosecution for war crimes.

This is a long essay about the changing ratio of military to civilian casualties written by Historian Mark Selden

Before the Bomb: The “Good War”, Air Power and the Logic of Mass DestructionBetween February and August 1945 the U.S. air war reached an intensity that half a century later remains unrivaled in the magnitude of technological slaughter directed against a people. That moment was a product of the combination of technological breakthroughs together with the erosion of all moral and political restraints on the killing of civilians.

The Firebombing of Japan: A Victim’s Perspective on The Logic of Mass Destruction

U.S. raids on Japanese cities began with James Doolittle’s solitary mission of April 18, 1942, widely hailed as the U.S. response to Pearl Harbor. All sixteen B-25 bombers were lost, however, when they were forced to land in Japanese territory. The U.S. would make no further attempt to raid Japan’s home islands for three years. The full fury of firebombing and napalm was not unleashed on Japan until the night of March 9-10, 1945. LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyo from recently acquired bases in Guam, Saipan and Tinian. Their mission was to reduce the city to rubble with jellied gasoline and napalm. U.S. bombers carried two kinds of incendiaries: M47s, 100 pound oil-gel bombs, 182 per aircraft, each capable of starting a major fire, followed by M69s, 6-pound gelled-gasoline bombs, 1,520 per aircraft in addition to a few high explosives to deter firefighters. The attack on an area that the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey estimated to be 87.4 percent residential succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of air force planners. Whipped by fierce winds, flames detonated by the bombs leaped across Tokyo generating immense firestorms that engulfed and killed tens of thousands of residents. In contrast with Vonnegut’s cool “wax museum” description, of Dresden survivors, accounts from inside the inferno that engulfed Tokyo chronicle scenes of utter carnage. We have come to measure the efficacy of bombing by throw weights and kill ratios. Here I would like to offer some perspectives drawing on the words of those who felt the wrath of the bombs.

Fleeing the flames, thousands plunged in desperation into the freezing waters of rivers, canals and Tokyo Bay: A woman spent the night knee-deep in the bay, holding onto a piling with her three-year-old son clinging to her back; by morning several of the people around her were dead of burns, shock, fatigue and hypothermia. Thousands submerged themselves in stagnant, foul-smelling canals with their mouths just above the surface, but many died from smoke inhalation, anoxia, or carbon monoxide poisoning, or were boiled to death when the fire storm heated the water. Others, huddling in canals connected to the Sumida River, drowned when the tide came in. . . . Huge crowds lined the gardens and parks along the Sumida, and as the masses behind them pushed toward the river, walls of screaming people fell in and vanished. Police cameraman Ishikawa Koyo described the streets of Tokyo as “rivers of fire. Everyone could see flaming pieces of furniture exploding in the heat, while the people themselves blazed like “matchsticks” as their wood and paper homes exploded in flames. Under the wind and the gigantic breath of the fire, immense incandescent vortices rose in a number of places, swirling, flattening, sucking whole blocks of houses into their maelstrom of fire.” Dr. Kubota Shigenori, head of a military rescue unit, recalled that “In the black Sumida River countless bodies were floating, clothed bodies, naked bodies, all as black as charcoal. It was unreal. These were dead people, but you couldn’t tell whether they were men or women. You couldn’t even tell if the objects floating by were arms and legs or pieces of burnt wood.” Father Flaujac, a French cleric, compared the firebombing to the Tokyo earthquake twenty-two years earlier, an event whose massive destruction had alerted some of the original planners of the Tokyo holocaust to the possibilities of destruction. ‘In September 1923, during the great earthquake, I saw Tokyo burning for 5 days. I saw in Honjo a heap of 33,000 corpses of people who burned or suffocated at the beginning of the bombardment. . . . After the first quake there were 20-odd centers of fire, enough to destroy the capital. How could the conflagration be stopped when incendiary bombs in the dozens of thousands now dropped over the four corners of the district and with Japanese houses which are only match boxes? . . . In 1923 the fire spread on the ground. At the time of the bombings the fire fell from the sky. . . . Where could one fly? The fire was everywhere.’ Nature reinforced man’s handiwork in the form of akakaze, the red wind that swept with hurricane force across the Tokyo plain and propelled firestorms across the city with terrifying speed and intensity. The wind drove temperatures up to eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit, creating superheated vapors that advanced ahead of the flames, killing or incapacitating their victims. “The mechanisms of death were so multiple and simultaneous-oxygen deficiency and carbon monoxide poisoning, radiant heat and direct flames, debris and the trampling feet of stampeding crowds-that causes of death were later hard to ascertain. . .”

Because, apparently, I believe something different than you and all your friends and colleagues (and quite frankly, 99.9% of the rest of the world, if I am to go by feedback which reaches me. It's just me, and according to Ian, Judy Wood's "nasty pussy." Oh! Don't forget! It is a matter of some importance!)

You're a real person to me, whether you're James or Steve. I truly don't want anything bad to happen to you. There have been quite a few suicides and unexplained deaths of young men around this issue. I want it to stop now. I think the more open and available all this info is, the more likely to put an end to all the killing.(Although my ego would love for you to be James! What do they call my type in the clandestine field? "Walk-ins?" Volunteer spies philosophically motivated? That's me, I hope you believe that. I have no ulterior motive other than the ego which we all share. Aren't I DAMN GOOD!!!?)

I've contacted you half-a-dozen times. Each time you have dismissed me out of hand. Why would you now engage me with a question?

I think the last times you contacted me via email you were either hostile or cryptic if I remember correctly so why should I have done anything other than dissmiss it?

Everyone doesnt believe the sames things and if that was going to cause me troubles I would be clinically insane by now. BCO is not my forum so I dont care what you do there. Criticalthrash is my only messageboard and that is why I banned you from it and recently updated the code so you cant view it at all unless you are logged on. I have no control over bco thankfully so I dont care what you do there.

I am definitely not james schauer. I assume you must have found the thread someone on the net that saw that my old phone number was listed as j schauer. I do know a former j schauer though very well infact but thier name is certainly not james.

Funny, but I sent you that other email asking you if you could unban me before I saw this one. Also I worked real hard on a blog linking with a bunch of my critical thrash threads but I guess that is useless since you've updated your code to close off CT from outsiders. I'll have to scan my thread printouts since I want to make my CT dialogues public. I guess your not going to unban me in any case.

You banned me from CT because I was making such an ass of myself, but you weren't hanging out there and posting at the time. You had started two threads in six months. You were posting on crewcial then. I remember when your guinea pig died (I'm sorry.) and when you'd talk about basketball. It's weird that you would switch back over there but I'm sure everybody's glad to have you back. Tell Aaron and dzeman and knucklehead and peaceful warrior and carvey and all the rest I really miss them.

I'm sorry if I came across as sarcastic or rude in my private contacts. I know we disagree on the facts etc. but hope we can respect how funny/odd we find the position we are in.

I'll be completely upfront with you about the James Schauer thing. One day, about the time I wrote the blog about it, I suddenly was face to face with a document on my screen. It was the standard WHOIS looking page for CT but it had the James Schauer name, the address and the phone number. As soon as I saw it I recognized it for "what it was," a powerful piece of evidence--with absolutely nothing backing it up. Lots of people must have had access to my hard drive. Somebody (do you have enemies?) must have planted it on my computer (Lots and lots of stuff has disappeared off my hard drive. Off hand, I can think of only one or two other "significant" things that have "appeared" out of nowhere onto it.)

So, anyway, it is not very professional of me to go forward with information as vague as I did. However, I thought, if I was doing anybody any harm then I could simply take it down without too much damage. Although the name hasn't gotten much of a rise out of anybody, several little pieces of information have lent some validity to it (like your email here!) I believe James Schauer at that address and phone number was the original registrant of CT. It might have been your roommate, or your colleague, or your brother-in-law--whatever. The name is associated with that Navy guy (just like Tim Timmerman is associated with the Navy photographers club.)

Anything you want me to correct or change just ask and I'll consider it! In the meantime I guess we may have to agree to disagree. I'm going to the library tomorrow to see if it's just me locked out of CT or everybody is now outside the (closed) membership. Boy, you are really having to change the rules of engagement aren't you? That's what I meant about being trouble to you (on a personal level.)

I still dont really post on my messageboard (criticalthrash) any more. Im just not into it. I dont post on bco anymore either because ive learned my lesson about posting personally on public forums. I dont understand how james schauer could have ever shown up under a whois as I was the only one to ever register that domain. i think you may be mistaken there. My phone number at the time was registered under j schauer because that was my fiances name.

I dont care if you change anything on your site. It doesnt bother me if people think im some james schauer. Im way over caring if people believe anything I have to say anymore. Yes you shouldnt be able to get to criticalthrash.com from anywhere. its not just you. Ive set it up so that you have to be logged in to view anything about the board and ive closed the create a new account link so no one esle can register for the time being.

honestly, i would unban you because i dont care what you do on there i just dont want people mining for information on me to post other places. granted, i havent posted anything new on thier since you were banned but i figure why take the change? you already taught me my lesson.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Adding more warp and weft to the confusing tapestry that is the Associated Press breaking news wire related to terrorism from September 11th, is this report.

The female co-anchor of the local Washington D.C. affiliate of FOX News, at 7:59pm EDT, says,

“You know, in an odd twist here, I’m going to read this from the Associated Press, it’s just now coming into our studios, Bryant, I should say, Bryant, is, stepped away…State Police out of Baltimore are telling us they have arrested a Baltimore man who confessed to falsely reporting information about possible targets in Maryland for today’s terrorist attacks. Police spokesperson Greg Shipley says that the 23-year-old man was arrested shortly after 7pm tonight in his Baltimore home. He says the suspect will be charged with filing a false report, ah, that shifted a crime investigation, so I’m sure we’ll be learning more about that, but ah, that’s an odd twist to this.”

The Associated Press breaking news wire as maintained by Thomas Crosbie Media ends at 6:58pm EDT, an hour before this report is timestamped. Why does the seemingly comprehensive Crosbie archive abort the day's reports at this time? Isn't it likely that other AP reports were issued relating to the War on Terrorism between 7pm and midnight on the 11th? How about word of Bush's speech at 9pm for those who lacked access to television?

This is a very interesting news item, with the highest grade of credibility by dint of its named police source. I don't recall word of this rumor-monger ever being repeated again though. Google reports nothing. Next up, the Secret Service should be investigated for their deplorable rumor-mongering.

At 10:16 a policemen shouted for everyone to move away from the building. A man in U.S. Army fatigues barked orders to six men who were carrying a stretcher with a wounded man. He told them they would carry wounded until their muscles could take no more. Then he went back into the Pentagon.

At 10:28, a speaker from a police car told the milling throng of military personnel, civilians and police to move away, that another hijacked jet was reportedly headed toward the Pentagon.

At 10:45, when a U.S. jet fighter plane screamed overhead, everyone flinched and ducked.

At 11:25 the hundreds of rescue, military and police officials rushed away from the building, fearing new blasts.

At 11:30 they all hustled back to the scene, the peril temporarily passed.

At 11:53, another mass evacuation occurred at ground zero

Anyway, the article's still up at Gannett, but you saw it first here:

BENGE: PENTAGON BLAST SENT ME OUT OF THE BUILDING AND INTO THE FRAY By George Benge, News Executive, Gannett Co., Inc.

I was sitting at the keyboard in an Arlington, Va., office tower about two miles from the Pentagon Tuesday morning. It was 9:45 a.m. I felt two fast, consecutive thumps.

Having just seen TV reports of the horrific attack on the World Trade Center, I thought fleetingly, but dismissively that it sounded like explosions. Maybe they're after this office tower, too.

Minutes later a colleague dashed into my 26th-floor office, shouting that the Pentagon had been bombed and people were leaving the building. Within minutes I joined others hustling down the stairs.

I jumped into a cab and told the driver to get me as close to the Pentagon as he could. He dropped me off on a freeway ramp that was on the opposite side of where plumes of grayish, black smoke were billowing up and over the Pentagon.

It was 10:12 a.m. Walking toward the Pentagon, I felt and heard what seemed to be two more quick thumps. But there were no other signs of explosions.

Going closer, I saw people on orange stretchers in a shaded area. An intravenous bag was held over one victim. Others were lying motionless as medical personnel hovered around them.

At 10:16 a policemen shouted for everyone to move away from the building.

A man in U.S. Army fatigues barked orders to six men who were carrying a stretcher with a wounded man. He told them they would carry wounded until their muscles could take no more. Then he went back into the Pentagon.

A shirtless sailor walked by. Another man dressed in sailor whites walked gingerly away with the assistance of three men, the sailor's head wrapped in white gauze.

At 10:28, a speaker from a police car told the milling throng of military personnel, civilians and police to move away, that another hijacked jet was reportedly headed toward the Pentagon.

The crowds moved quickly as requested, their eyes rising apprehensively to the sky. A few minutes later, another order rang out to move out of the open and to move quickly.

At 10:45, when a U.S. jet fighter plane screamed overhead, everyone flinched and ducked.

None of the persons interviewed at the scene actually saw the crash, and most were reluctant to give their names. However, Marine Sgt. Gary Nichols summed it up for many, saying, "I was pretty close. I heard a big bang and saw a bunch of smoke."

Walking around the building, seeing a massive, blackened gash in the side of the seemingly impenetrable Pentagon was numbing. Fire hoses streamed water into the wounded, historic edifice. Flames and smoke rose from the point of impact and through blown-out windows at least a block away.

Cars parked next to the building were smoldering ruins, flames shot up from an auxiliary trailer close to the Pentagon, and some debris was in the roadway directly in front of the building.

A white-shirted police officer provided a security checkpoint one block from ground zero. His shirt, hand and arm were bloodied. He said he had pulled a lady and a baby out of a window.

At 11:25 the hundreds of rescue, military and police officials rushed away from the building, fearing new blasts. At 11:30 they all hustled back to the scene, the peril temporarily passed.

At 11:53, another mass evacuation occurred at ground zero.

Then everyone returned, and the rescue continued.

How come I never got to see any sailors with their shirts off? And do note "None of the persons interviewed at the scene actually saw the crash." While, "He told them they would carry wounded until their muscles could take no more," has to be the most comical line of the Pentagon 9/11 scenario. Especially since I pronounce his name as Ben-Gay. Har, har.

The alternative Associated Press archive for September 11tth, 2001, " 25 AP News Alerts, 18 Bulletins and Two 'Flashes", contains no reports out of New York from between 1:00pm and 10:30pm. An APNewsAlert out of New York from 11:15am, is headed, "Mayor Giuliani says: "I have a sense it's a horrendous number of lives lost," and although the body of that report isn't publicly available, its title quote is anomalous to O'Neill's subject matter.

This report didn't really need further attribution to the AP, since two eyewitness sources quoted within it, Associated Press newsman Dunstan Prial, and Joan Goldstein, communications project leader for AP, provide internal verification. All together, they help support the identification of the Thomas Moore archive as the legitimate AP breaking news archive.

On the streets of Manhattan, peoplestood in groups talking quietly or watchingon television at ground-level network studios.

(Seattle Times)NEW YORK — It was the scene of a nightmare: people on fire jumping in terror from the World Trade Center towers just before the buildings collapsed. "Everyone was screaming, crying, running — cops, people, firefighters, everyone," said Mike Smith, a fire marshal from Queens, as he sat by the fountain outside a state courthouse, shortly after the second tower collapsed. "A couple of marshals just picked me up and dragged me down the street.New York — It was the scene of anightmare: people on fire jumping interror from the Trade Towers justbefore the buildings collapsed.‘‘Everyone was screaming, crying, running, cops, people, firefighters,everyone,’’ said Mike Smith, a firemarshal from Queens, as he sat by thefountain outside the Supreme Courtbuilding shortly after the second towercollapsed. ‘‘A couple of marshals justpicked me up and dragged me downthe street.

‘‘It’s like a war zone. There aremany injured.’’This was the horror unfolding inNew York City in the wake of anapparent terrorist attack.

(Atlanta Journal) ‘‘I just saw the building I work in come down,’’ said businessman Gabriel Ioan, shaking in shock outside City Hall with a cloud of smoke and ash from the World Trade Center behind him. ‘‘I just saw the top of Trade Two come down.’’‘‘I just saw the building I work income down,’’ said businessman GabrielLoan, shaking in shock outsideCity Hall as a cloud of smoke and ashfrom the World Trade Center billowedbehind him. ‘‘I just saw the top ofTrade Two come down.’’

Nearby a crowd mobbed a man on a pay-phone, screaming at him to get off the phone so that they could call relatives.Nearby, a crowd mobbed a man ona pay phone, screaming at him to getoff so that they could call relatives.

Dust and dirt flew everywhere. Ash was two to three inches deep in places. People wandered dazed and terrified.Dust and dirt flew everywhere. Ashwas 2 to 3 inches deep in places. Peoplewandered dazed and terrified.

‘‘People were jumping out of windows,’’said an unidentified cryingwoman. ‘‘I guess people were trying tosave themselves. Oh my God!’’

‘‘I was in the World Financial Center looking out the window,’’ said one woman. ‘‘I saw the first plane and then 15 minutes later saw the other plane just slam into the World Trade Center.’’‘‘I was in the World Financial Centerlooking out the window,’’ said onewoman. ‘‘I saw the first plane and then15 minutes later saw the other planejust slam into the World TradeCenter.’’

Another eyewitness, Associated Press newsman Dunstan Prial, described a strange sucking sound from the Trade Center buildings after the first building collapsed.Another eyewitness, AP newsmanDunstan Prial, described a strangesucking sound from the Trade Centerbuildings after the first buildingcollapsed.

‘‘Windows shattered. People were screaming and diving for cover. People walked around like ghosts, covered in dirt, weeping and wandering dazed.’’‘‘Windows shattered. People werescreaming and diving for cover. Peoplewalked around like ghosts, covered indirt, weeping and wandering dazed.’’‘‘It sounded like a jet or rocket,’’ said Eddie Gonzalez, a postal worker at a post office on West Broadway. ‘‘I looked up and saw a huge explosion. I didn’t see the impact. I just saw the explosion.’’‘‘It sounded like a jet or rocket,’’said Eddie Gonzalez, a postal workerat a post office on West Broadway. ‘‘Ilooked up and saw a huge explosion. Ididn’t see the impact. I just saw theexplosion.’’

Morning commuters heading into Manhattan were stranded as the Lincoln Tunnel was shut to incoming traffic. Many left their cars and stood on the ramp leading to the tunnel, staring in disbelief at the thick cloud of smoke pouring from the top of the two buildings.Morning commuters heading intoManhattan were stranded as the LincolnTunnel was shut down to incomingtraffic. Many left their cars andstood on the ramp leading to the tunnel,staring in disbelief at the thickcloud of smoke pouring from the topof the two buildings.

Joan Goldstein, communications project leader for AP, was on a bus from New Jersey when she saw ‘‘smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center building. We said, ‘Oh, my God! The World Trade Center’s on fire!’’ Perhaps 10 minutes later, ‘‘All of a sudden, there was an orange plume, a huge explosion. It shot out the back of the building. Everybody on the bus was just moaning and gasping,’’ said Goldstein, who wept and trembled as she spoke.Joan Goldstein, communicationsproject leader for the Associated Press,was on a bus from New Jersey atabout 8:50 a.m. when she saw ‘‘smokepouring out of the World Trade Centerbuilding. We said, ‘Oh, my God! TheWorld Trade Center’s on fire!’ ’’Perhaps 10 minutes later, ‘‘All of asudden, there was an orange plume, ahuge explosion. It shot out the back ofthe building. Everybody on the buswas just moaning and gasping.’’

The plume was from the second plane,but she didn’t see the plane becauseof the thick smoke.

She tried to call friends who work there,but couldn’t get through.

"It was the most horrible thing I’ve everseen in my life," said Goldstein.